The stories of early modern Protestant women, including Rose Thurgood, Anna Trapnel, and Jane Lead, who defied the religious authority of their age.
Voices of Thunderilluminates the stories and beliefs of a dozen seventeenth-century radical Protestant women, including a Colchester woman who feared that her four children would starve to death and a former maidservant from Yorkshire who was granted an audience with the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Their belief in spiritual equality empowered them to resist the status quo, questioning the authority of those who sought to lord it over them. From mostly humble backgrounds, they found ways to make their voices heard, creating some of the earliest autobiographical accounts in English and allowing us a rare and precious glimpse of the lives and experiences of women in the early modern era.
Naomi Bakeris a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Manchester. She has published widely on early modern women’s writing, as well as early modern literature, drama, and culture, and is the author of
Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture.
Radical spiritual writingprophecies, autobiographies, spiritual accountswas a genre in which women flourished, introducing new experiences into print: they wrote about childbirth, about raising and feeding children, about abusive marriages, about their own trials with poverty and hunger, about travel and their encounters with cultures across the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Their texts are not typically included in histories of feminismthere is so often that odd gap between Christine de Pizan, in the fifteenth century, and Mary Wollstonecraft, in the eighteenthbut Baker shows that to ignore this work is to ignore a set of idiosyncratic, clamorous, complex testimonies about what it was like to live then as a fierce female critic of ones own society.
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